Star Wars Dreadnoughts
Greetings fellow wargamers!
Once in a while it’s nice to break stride to embark on a project just for fun. After all the dice rolling and rules lawyering and back and forth, it’s good to remind ourselves at the end of the day that we are playing with little plastic toys and we’re all just big kids at heart, trying to get a few more minutes out of our childhoods.
On that note I present some Star Wars dreadnoughts! I have a friend in Virginia, was best man at his wedding, who LOVES Star Wars. And by loves I mean would go down on George Lucas loves Star Wars. A few years ago I got the idea, as a gag gift, to build him a few Star Wars dreadnoughts. He’s a Chaos player after all, and I thought he’d appreciate the humor behind my gift. At the time I was experimenting with the Venerable Dreadnought kit for a few projects and had quite a few extras lying around my bits box. Many of the pieces featured on these dreadnoughts are from a variety of kits, including tau bits, imperial bits, spares from various kits like valkyries . . so many pieces, even I don’t know where they all came from anymore!
Since these were a gag gift anyway, I didn’t spend a gregarious amount of time painting them up to a stellar degree. I mostly just wanted to get a basic feeling across for the figures, which I think more or less I accomplished. As far as Vader goes, I wanted to add a little OSL, but my airbrush was out of order at the time I painted up the project, so I had to stick with some very basic red drybrush work to get the effect of the red glow of parts of his armor.
When I started experimenting with the heads of the figures, I thought “Yes, I could buy some 20mm star wars mini’s and put smaller heads in place of the venerable dreadnought heads” but it didn’t get the feel for what I wanted to accomplish. I wanted these to be more like bobblehead figures. Big and silly and draw a lot of attention on a book shelf. So I went the other direction, rounded up some action figures sized star wars toys, and cut them to pieces. Mostly the only parts I needed were the heads. I kept the rest of the parts handy for whatever future screwball project I think up next.
My favorite figures to paint by far must have been Boba Fett. I didn’t realize how much I liked the paint scheme of green on red metallic until I painted it up first hand. I actually think it would work really well as the color scheme of an entire warband, like Tau or Necrons or CSM or the like.
Love them or hate them, they were certainly fun to build an another interesting project for the old gallery, which I expand upon daily.
My name is Caleb and I am the owner of White Metal Games, a conversion and painting service based out of Raleigh, NC. We hope you’ll consider using our services for your wargaming needs, but until you do . . . PUT YOUR MINIS WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS!
jdj